Four layers of stewardship. One foundation for trust.
The Open Rail Corpus operates under a four-layer stewardship framework developed openly at openrxm.org since 2019. Each layer has a distinct responsibility, a distinct steward, and a distinct change-control discipline.
A versioned specification for Corpus Bundle structure. Changes require a formal proposal, public comment period, and committee vote. The threshold for changing existing schema is intentionally high — stability is the primary value. For v1, the schema steward is Kerne Systems. Post-v1, stewardship transitions to the Rail SIG working group under a named convenor.
Allocation of sub-namespaces within kerne.systems/. The rail
sub-domain is allocated to the Rail SIG for Intelligent Asset Management,
operated by Kerne Systems. Other sub-domains (other transport modes, other
eternal functions, non-terrestrial) may be allocated to other operators
under the same framework. Allocation principles follow RFC 1466
(demonstrated need, conservation, fairness). No speculative allocations.
Any candidate failure-mode record, entity, or regulatory anchor can be
validated against the current Corpus Bundle schema. v1 ships
schema.json with each bundle for client-side validation; a
public validation API endpoint is a v1.1 deliverable.
Namespace conflicts, disputed allocations, and bad-faith registrations are handled through a lightweight arbitration process modelled on WIPO UDRP. For the rail sub-domain, the first-instance arbitrator is the Rail SIG convenor (2026: Urs Gehrig as SIG Chair). Appeals escalate to the governance committee. No conflicts exist at v1 publication. The mechanism is prophylactic.
The Open Rail Corpus is community-extended through the Rail SIG for Intelligent Asset Management working group. Contributions are proposed via the working group channel, evaluated for scope, provenance, and public-licensability, and — if accepted — integrated into a subsequent v1.x or v2.x release. Direct edits to published bundles are not accepted.
Content of the Open Rail Corpus is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share and adapt the material for any purpose, including commercial use, under the terms of attribution.
The CC BY 4.0 license applies to content. Trademarks ("Open Rail Corpus", "Kerne", "Kerne Systems") and the Failure Mode Ledger Account (FMLA) method (Kerne Systems, pat. pend.) are retained by Gehrig Partner AG and are not licensed under CC BY 4.0.